Mr Byrd raised his hand to greet Dan. From his tacked-on seat at the end of the front row, he could see both the set and also part of what was going on behind the scenes. The set, decorated with the apparent intention of resembling the inside of an aircraft hanger, was separated from the backstage area only by a temporary stage-divider that didn’t quite reach the side wall. Before Marco appeared, Mr Byrd saw Emma take her overseeing position against the wall. He waved.
Emma looked up and caught sight of him. After the initial surprise of seeing someone wave, she noticed who it was and sent a nod of acknowledgement his way.
Neither Dan nor the rest of the audience he was facing could see anything backstage, and with no clock in sight Dan didn’t know exactly when the show would begin.
“Live in ten,” someone called. “Nine.”
Dan straightened his back in his chair. Everything suddenly felt too real, and the nervous butterflies in his stomach had Dan looking forward to being hypnotised in front of the country if only to get a moment of calm.
When Marco’s introductory music hit, a sign that said [APPLAUSE] flashed high above the set, encouraging Mr Byrd and everyone else to play their part.
Marco Magnifico walked on to receive the applause. “Welcome to this very special edition of The Marco Magnifico Variety Hour,” he said as the noise died down, “Live and Unfiltered! I’m sure you know all about our guest tonight for this exclusive interview.”
[APPLAUSE]
Mr Byrd joined the rest of the audience in applauding Dan.
Marco took his seat across a small table from Dan, who was on a low couch. “Thanks for coming, Dan,” he said.
Silence circled for a moment before Dan realised he was supposed to speak. “Uh, yeah. No problem,” he eventually stammered. He could see the earpiece in Marco’s ear and wondered for the first time why he didn’t have a hidden one of his own so Emma could feed him the right lines.
“A brief note before we begin,” Marco announced directly into the hard camera. “Despite agenda-driven claims to the contrary, Dan McCarthy has never been clinically diagnosed with schizotypal personality disorder or any other psychiatric condition. Dan McCarthy exhibits no contraindications for hypnosis. Dan McCarthy has given his full, express, and informed consent to be placed under hypnosis for entertainment purposes.”
[APPLAUSE]
This didn’t seem particularly worthy of applause but Mr Byrd obliged nonetheless, if somewhat less enthusiastically than his fellow audience members.
Dan still didn’t like people talking about his misdiagnosis, even when they were correctly dismissing it, but he focused more happily on the beginning of Marco’s disclaimer. The inclusion of the term “agenda-driven” indicated to Dan that Marco was on his side, or at the very least open-minded.
With the formalities concluded, Marco began the show.
“Our guest this evening has been variously described as a truth-seeker, a conspiracy theorist, and—”
“That’s a loaded term,” Dan interrupted.
Marco took his eyes from the camera and looked at Dan. “Excuse me?”
“Conspiracy theorist,” Dan said. “When you call someone a conspiracy theorist, you undermine them before you even hear what they have to say. It sets up an asymmetrical discussion.”
A handful of people in the audience began to applaud, but the majority were already dependent on the flashing prompt for cues.
Mr Byrd looked past the edge of the stage-divider to Emma, who was giving him an enthusiastic thumbs up with one hand and pointing in Dan’s direction with the other. Mr Byrd quickly understood the request and held his thumb up to Dan while hinting towards Emma with his eyes.
Dan relaxed. It felt good to have an unambiguously friendly face in the audience and it felt even better to have a line of communication to Emma, however limited and indirect.
“Okay,” Marco said. “So does that mean you’re not here to tell us about the time you went sailing with Bigfoot and found Elvis in the Bermuda triangle?”
[LAUGHTER]
Mr Byrd looked up at the new flashing sign, positioned just to the right of the other.
“I kid, I kid,” Marco smiled. “He’s not here to talk about anything silly, folks… just little green men and flying saucers.”
[LAUGHTER] [&] [APPLAUSE]
Dan shrugged it off. “I’m used to this, and so is your audience. We’re used to the power class mocking every dissenting voice.”
“If I’m part of the power class,” Marco said to the studio audience, “could one of you tell my bank account?”
[LAUGHTER]
“Exactly,” Dan said. “Billy Kendrick talked about this yesterday. We’re too busy laughing at the jester on the stage to wonder what’s going on behind the curtain.”
“Are you calling me a jester?” Marco asked in a light-hearted tone.
Dan hesitated. “Aren’t jesters supposed to be funny?”
As with the earlier unprompted applause, a few audience members laughed heartily but stopped when they realised that no one else was joining in. After a brief but awkward silence, the sign lit up:
[LAUGHTER]
Mr Byrd didn’t bother, but everyone around him did their best fake laugh. It amazed him how blindly they all followed the orders of a flashing sign.
“Okay, enough of the funny stuff,” Marco said, forcing a warm smile. “Let’s get started.”
The lights in the studio dimmed to a level similar to the inside of a cinema.
A new sign appeared. It was yellow, static, and to the left of the others:
[SILENCE]
If it wouldn’t have looked like an admission of guilt, Dan would have walked away right then. The audience didn’t look so small in the dark, and the tiny lights shining down on him from the ceiling made him feel more exposed than ever.
“Are you comfortable?” Marco asked softly.
“Yeah,” Dan lied.
“Lean back for me,” Marco whispered. “Now raise your feet and rest them on the other end of the couch. Good.”
Dan was impressed and a little unnerved by Marco’s immediate transformation; there was no longer any of the brash, showman-like arrogance that had oozed through his words prior to the lights dimming above the audience. The voice and tone now reminded Dan of a free mp3 file he had downloaded from some Canadian health agency’s website a few years earlier when he was having trouble sleeping.
As Marco continued, Dan closed his eyes and tried to imagine that he was in bed at home listening to that file. The last whispered words he consciously heard were “extremely relaxed”, and from them on he was entirely at Marco’s mercy.
Mr Byrd watched on uneasily. He saw Emma standing against the side wall of the still-lit backstage area, looking up at what he assumed was a large screen.
“Dan can hear me, and he can respond,” Marco explained to the few hundred audience members and the tens of millions of viewers at home. “He can wake up at any point, and I can’t force him to say anything. This interview won’t follow our normal pattern; Dan will remain on his couch with his eyes closed for the duration, as he would if he was a patient from my pre-TV days. Isn’t that right, Dan?”
“That’s right,” Dan said. He pursed his lips, suddenly dry.
[APPLAUSE]
The [SILENCE] sign on the left was still lit, confusing the audience. When it momentarily flicked off, they applauded diligently until it returned.
“Now,” Marco said to the camera. “Under hypnosis, patients sometimes claim that aliens forced them to forget their abduction experiences. Maybe they flashed a little Men In Black gadget in their eyes? Anyway, through regression therapy we can get to the heart of such experiences. So, Dan… can you tell me what they look like?”
“Who?” Dan asked in a tone best described as sleepy.
“The aliens.”
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen one.”
“O-kay…” Marco said, turning his head away from Dan to directly add
ress the camera again. “You know how showbiz types always say you should never work with kids or animals? Well, in hypnosis we say never do live TV.” Marco looked over each of his shoulders. “Where’s my agent?”
[LAUGHTER]
Mr Byrd rolled his eyes.
“Seriously, though,” Marco said, “Dan has never claimed to have any abduction memories, so that was the right answer. He passed the test.”
[APPLAUSE]
After a brief commercial break during which Marco spoke gently to Dan about things like work and hobbies, he moved onto the real questions.
* * *
Even under hypnosis, Dan had all the right answers.
He regurgitated familiar responses to familiar queries, such as why there was no clear video record of alien visitation and what the government stood to gain from covering something like this up.
Dan shared his previously unshared personal speculation of what might be inside the sphere, suggesting that “something that works like a musical birthday card” would be sensible since the recipient of such a card doesn’t have to understand how the electronics work in order to hear the message. He also defended the virtues of sending a physical object against Marco’s position that wave-based communications were superior.
“If I send you a message through a radio,” Dan said, “you’re only going to hear it if you have your radio turned on and tuned to the right frequency. But if I throw a rock at your head, you’re going to notice.”
Satisfied with Dan’s lively responses, Marco then broached the issue of the Kerguelen folder itself. This change in direction would have worried Dan were he more conscious of the context of the questions. Blissfully relaxed, he stuck to his story of literally crashing into the IDA thief who then dropped the folder on the street. Fortunately for Dan and his decision to keep the German letter quiet until he had the chance to show it to Clark, Marco didn’t press for a recap of what was inside the folder.
When Dan dealt with these questions as well as he and Emma could have hoped, Marco shifted gears and brought up the schoolwork that had been published in Monday’s Daily Chat. In his answers, Dan recalled forgotten details about Mrs Dempsey’s too-hot classroom and the day his dad bought him the poster.
“Tell me about your father,” Marco said. “I gather he’s currently…”
As Marco trailed off, Mr Byrd looked up and saw that Emma had moved away from the side wall and out of his view.
Marco pressed a finger to his ear. “Hold that thought,” he said. “We’ll be right back after these short messages. Dan, stay relaxed.”
“He’s in the hospital,” Dan said, but Marco had already stood up and walked backstage.
The entire audience then heard an angry voice that Mr Byrd immediately recognised as Emma’s. A burst of music quickly drowned it out.
Marco missed his cue when the show returned from its commercial break. The show’s music kept playing on TV but cut in the studio. With no signs to tell them whether to stay silent, laugh, or applaud, most of the audience talked quietly amongst themselves. Mr Byrd was sure he heard the words “my fucking show” seconds before Marco returned, smiling as though nothing had happened.
“Welcome back,” he said to the viewers at home. “Still with me, Dan?”
“I’m still here,” Dan said.
“Good. I was worried you might have been abducted again.”
[LAUGHTER]
“I wasn’t abducted before,” Dan said, his mind still calm and his body still totally relaxed.
At this point, Marco sat in his chair and reached down beside it to pick up a doll, roughly three times the size of a Barbie. “Zoom in,” he said.
When the cameraman did so, the detail of the doll became clear. Mr Byrd could already see that it was an effigy of Dan, complete with an impressively accurate representation of the hairstyle and glasses he had only had for a few days. The effigy wore a tinfoil hat and a T-shirt which read: “I’m not crazy, everyone else is!”
[LAUGHTER]
Marco held the doll out to Dan, whose eyes were still closed. “Dan, can you remember where the bad aliens touched you?”
[LAUGHTER] [&] [APPLAUSE]
“How could an alien touch me when I’ve never even seen one?” Dan asked. He sounded like a child as he said it. Mr Byrd watched uncomfortably, thinking back to Dan’s childhood when he had too often been taken advantage of by people he didn’t realise were making fun of him. Reading social cues and seeing the bad in people had never been easy for Dan, even when he was fully conscious.
“Why don’t you just pretend that you’ve seen one?” Marco asked. “Maybe then you could be rich and famous and get a big house, like you’ve always wanted?”
Emma disappeared from Mr Byrd’s view again.
“I’m not going to lie,” Dan said.
“Really?”
“No. Why would I want to lie about being abducted? The folder is evidence enough.”
“Evidence enough for what?” Marco pushed. “To get the kind of attention you crave? The kind of approval you so desperately need?”
Mr Byrd heard Emma say something in the silence before Dan replied. A few other people near him did, too, judging by their attempts to crane their necks enough to look behind the stage-divider. She was still nowhere to be seen.
“I don’t know what you mean about wanting attention,” Dan said. “I don’t like all of this attention. I didn’t ask for it. I tried to be anonymous.”
“Really?” Marco said again, ever more condescendingly than before.
“Yes, really!” Dan insisted, his voice was sounding younger and more vulnerable with each answer. “I went to a library, and I used throwaway accounts, and I didn’t tell anyone online or in real life what I’d found. What else could I have done?”
Marco pressed his finger into his earpiece again, then defiantly removed the earpiece and dropped it on the floor behind his seat.
Emma came back into Mr Byrd’s view, now standing against the side wall with her hand on her chin in an uncharacteristic display of concern.
“Why don’t you tell me how it was growing up with no friends,” Marco said. “Did you ever, I don’t know, make things up to occupy yourself?”
Mr Byrd saw Emma gesturing to someone out of sight. He heard her shout: “If you don’t, I will.”
Emma then threw her hands up and stormed away from the wall. The next thing Mr Byrd and everyone else heard was Emma’s voice, loud and clear through the studio’s speakers: “Cut to commercials. Now!”
“Emma?” Dan said.
Marco turned to the source of the noise, recognising the voice from his unseen backstage argument during the last commercial break. “It would be helpful if security could take care of that heckler,” he said.
“Emma?” Dan repeated.
“No. No. The only voice you can hear is mine,” Marco whispered. “It’s just Dan and Marco. Dan and Marco. The only voice you can hear is mine.”
“Okay.”
“Now, I gather your mother left right around the time you were starting school, too. That must have been tough?”
Members of the audience looked at each other uneasily, not liking the way Marco was going. Marco seemed to have mistaken them for his own fans, when really they were a Dan crowd at a Marco show.
“I said cut to break,” Emma yelled, more loudly than before but this time without the benefit of the speakers’ amplification. She appeared again at the side wall, as though ready to step forward. Before she could, the same huge security guard who had been friendly with Dan earlier in the evening approached her from behind and placed his hands on her shoulders.
“Get your idiot hands off me,” Emma protested, sounding forceful rather than helpless.
The crowd began to murmur in defiance of the [SILENCE] sign. Any pretence of Marco being in control vanished when Mr Byrd left his front row seat to confront the overly physical security guard. On his way to the stage-divider, Mr Byrd looked at Marco and barked an order: �
�Wake him up. Show’s over.”
The [SILENCE] light flashed on and off a few times, but the only thing achieved by quietening the crowd was an increase in the audibility of Emma’s tussle with the security guard.
“I don’t know who let these people in,” Marco said, trying to talk over her and hopeful that the ruckus wouldn’t be coming across as loudly on TV as it was in the studio. “Remember, Dan: the only voice you can hear is mine. Now, can you remember why your mother left?”
The members of the audience nearest to Mr Byrd’s empty seat had again craned their necks, enabling them to see him talking calmly to the security guard. They then saw Emma take her chance to sneak away and walk past the stage-divider, out of the backstage area and towards the set.
“I don’t know,” Dan said, unaware of what was going on around him.
Marco saw Emma and gave a frantic cut-throat gesture to the cameraman.
“Wake him up,” Emma said.
“Cut,” Marco ordered.
Emma kept walking towards them. “Wake him up!”
“We’re cut,” a voice called from the back of the audience.
“What the hell is this?” Marco demanded, rising to his feet. “Someone get her out of the damn shot.”
Mr Byrd did his best to hold the security guard back.
“Listen, asshole,” Emma said. “If you ever want to be on TV again, you’ll wake him up right now.”
With no lights telling them what to do and all sense of order gone, many of the audience started recording the unfolding disaster on their phones. None of them knew who Emma was, but they all knew she wasn’t supposed to be there.
Marco saw the sea of phones and knew he had no option. He tried to put on his calm voice and counted up from one to five.
Dan’s eyes opened at five. He blinked several times. The sight that met his focus caused him to quickly sit upright, startled. “What’s going on?”
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